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Consortium battleship Hatsuse
Hatsuse was the fifth Miyagi-class fast battleship constructed for the Consortium as part of their general rearmament programme following a reentry to the galactic stage post-contact with the Terran Alliance. Design The design of the ''Miyagi-class fast battleships primarily grew out of a desire to improve upon their predecessors, the Kazusa class, with a new 41cm/53 naval gun that was just about to enter testing and promised significantly higher performance. Studies of Alliance history, in particular its conflicts with the Razorbird Empire, also showed the need to expand upon the light armament in order to stop the larger and heavier warships such as cruisers that the Aetanii had previously assumed would hold back in formation. This upwards trend of the secondary armament, expressly to stop cruisers on down in their tracks and to cover the flanks of the warship more readily than the main guns could, would eventually evolve even further in the Mikasa type, where the 15.5cm calibre would be reintroduced into the anti-torpedo boat armament. Basic design work of the type took significantly less time than the previous Kazusa class, as the Miyagi''s were by and large merely an enlarged ''Ehime, the final ship of that type: they retained the gentle sloping wedge of the previous class, which proved highly resistant to all types of beam and laser weaponry as well as kinetic artillery, in addition to their retention of the same type of thrusters and power plant. The shielding, however, was doubled in order to take advantage of the larger amount of space that could be devoted to the generators and manipulators. Armament The heavy gun artillery of the Miyagi class consisted of eighteen 41cm 53-calibre 'shock cannons', which operated under the Gauss system of electromagnetic projectiles. Capable of throwing a 2,500-kg (later 3,000 kg) shell at 4,505 km/s out to a range of 20 light-seconds without issue, these were both highly accurate and highly potent guns: a single hit could disable a lesser warship's shields and quite likely penetrate the armour protection as well, while even a warship of equal calibre would be hard-pressed to defend themselves. The shells themselves were generally guided armour-piercing (APC) or semi-armour-piercing (SAPC) projectiles with low-yield nuclear warheads for explosive filler, although 3-''Shiki'' "common" shells were incendiary fragmentation rounds for bombardment purposes and the 3-''Shiki Kai'' utilized Consortium thanatonium technology to cause gravitational stresses in an enemy vessel's hull structure. Hatsuse's secondary armament consisted of seventy-six 12.7cm/50 2-''Shiki'' naval guns: mounted in pairs along the flanks of the hull, they had a good field of engagement from any angle and were expressly intended to stop a marauding destroyer in its tracks before it could launch its torpedoes. In addition to these, she carried a large number of the Consortium's 5.7cm and 2cm autocannons for point defense purposes as well as exceptionally short-range combat against unarmoured vessels. History Commission Early Service Third War in Heaven Service Battle of Cora Dolor Later Years Decommissioning Category:Starships Category:Individual Starships Category:Battleships Category:Star Dreadnoughts Category:Consortium Starships Category:Aetanii Category:Flagships